Rwanda in 2003

By early January 2003, most of the estimated 23,000 Rwandan refugees who had been living in camps in Tanzania had been repatriated. The U.S. Committee for Refugees reported that the repatriation effort was not well organized and that close to 3,000 refugees had fled from Tanzania to Uganda seeking asylum, which helped to deepen the mistrust between the Rwandan and Ugandan governments. Tensions between the two countries heightened in January when Jean Bosco Barihima, leader of a Congolese rebel force, alleged that the Ugandan government was allowing Hutu dissidents to use Ugandan-controlled parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to execute cross-border attacks on Rwanda. Uganda flatly denied the allegations. Relations cooled significantly in March when a series of accusations were lobbed between the two countries; each blamed the other for supporting rebels in Bunia, a town in the DRC. (Rwanda had pulled its troops out of the DRC in September 2002.) The crisis rose to a significant level at the end of the month when the Rwandan parliament voted to redeploy troops to the DRC and when former Rwandan defense minister Emmanuel Habyarimana, who had been accused of engaging in subversive activities and holding Hutu-extremist views, was granted temporary asylum by Uganda. A meeting in early May between Presidents Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, hosted in London by British cabinet minister Clare Short (seeBiographies), eased tensions ahead of the installation of a transitional government in the DRC.

In August, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), to step down amid complaints by the Rwandan government that she had not been spending enough time prosecuting cases of accused war criminals from the 1994 genocide and following tensions over the ICTR’s attempt to prosecute crimes committed by Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front (FPR) in 1994, when it quelled the genocide. In September Gambian Hassan Jallow took over as the ICTR’s chief prosecutor. Broadcaster Ferdinand Nahimana of radio station RTLM and Hassan Ngeze, editor of the newspaper Kangura, were sentenced to life imprisonment on December 3. A third person, also from RTLM, received a 35-year sentence. Both media outlets were accused of having encouraged the 1994 genocide by publicizing names of those to be killed.

On August 25, in the first multiparty election held since the country gained independence from Belgium in 1962, Kagame won 95% of the vote. Although the election was deemed free and fair by independent international election observers, many campaign tactics were found to have been irregular, including harassment and intimidation of opposition party members and supporters. On October 10 the first democratically elected parliament was sworn into office, and the nine-year transitional government installed by the Tutsi-led FPR ended.